Don’t Ignore The Homegrown Terror Threat

Mark Potok is a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and editor-in-chief of its investigative magazine, Intelligence Report.

This piece has been updated and an editor's note has been added.

In the hours after a 7,000-pound truck bomb ripped through the Oklahoma City federal building 20 years ago this Sunday, killing 168 men, women and children, many commentators speculated about possible ties to Middle Eastern terrorists.

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The next day—still before any suspect was identified—an Iraqi refugee named Suhair Al Mosawi was at home a few miles from the city with her two-year-old daughter when a hail of bricks smashed her windows. Seven months pregnant, the terrified Muslim woman fled with her child to a bathroom, where she began to miscarry. Racing to the hospital a short while later, according to an account in The Boston Globe, her husband asked her to take off her veil, hoping to avoid still more abuse.

The next day, authorities fingered Timothy McVeigh, who had been arrested north of the city on unrelated charges 90 minutes after the bombing, as the primary suspect in the massacre. He was a white, native-born American, a U.S. Army veteran who had no connection to Islam. But for Suhair Al Mosawi and her stillborn baby boy, the revelation that Muslims had nothing to do with it arrived too late.

It was an ugly lesson that Americans would do well to remember.

The Sources of Terror

I was in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. I got there within three hours of the blast, while the shattered remains of the federal building were still in flames, and it was an experience I will never forget. The hurt that afflicted that small city—virtually every resident knew a victim, or at least knew someone who knew one—is hard to fathom now if you weren’t there. Grief for the murdered, especially the 19 small children obliterated in their day-care center, was overwhelming.

The slaughter was a wake-up call for Americans in general and law enforcement in particular. Even authorities who had long been reluctant to describe violent American radicals as terrorists had to change their tune. McVeigh had definitively shown that terrorists come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. The fact that he was American didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill other Americans.

A vast number of antigovernment plots by American radicals followed, some of them intending huge numbers of casualties. In the case of one 1997 Klan conspiracy in Texas, which involved blowing up a natural gas refinery outside of Fort Worth, as many as 30,000 people would have died if the plotters had not been stopped, according to federal authorities. But after the Al Qaeda attacks of 2001, law enforcement attention swung back hard to foreign jihadists.

While that is not difficult to understand—close to 3,000 Americans were murdered that day—the reality of domestic threats suggests a more evenhanded approach. A count by the New America Foundation last year found that right-wing extremists had killed 34 people in the United States since 9/11, while “terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology” had slain 21. According to New America’s Peter Bergen and David Sterman, none of the jihadists had acquired or used chemical or biological weapons, but 13 right-wing extremists had.

“Despite this history of deadly violence by individuals motivated by political ideologies other than al Qaeda, it is jihadist violence that continues to dominate the news and the attention of policy makers,” the article warned.

Our research at the Southern Poverty Law Center backs up that view. The numbers of hate groups—and especially antigovernment “Patriot” militia groups—surged after the first election of Barack Obama in late 2008. Although those numbers have fallen somewhat in the last two years, terrorist and other extremist violence has climbed back to levels similar to those of the 1990s, during the first wave of the militia movement. A recent SPLC study found that in the last six years, such incidents have occurred, on average, every 34 days.

Homegrown extremists have managed, in some cases, to gather highly destructive materials for weapons. In 2003, FBI agents raiding the home of William Krar, as well as storage facilities he had rented, found more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 small bombs, and almost two pounds of sodium cyanide. They also found components to turn the cyanide into bombs that could kill thousands. Krar pleaded guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and later died in prison.